Medellin Cartel

Founded in the mid-1970s and consolidated in the early 1980s by Pablo Escobar alongside the Ochoa family and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the Medellin Cartel built the trafficking infrastructure that made Colombia the source of most of the cocaine entering the United States, generating extraordinary wealth that Escobar used to buy political protection and, when that failed, to wage open war on the state. After the August 1989 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, the cartel declared war on the Colombian government and legal establishment, unleashing a campaign of car bombings, including the December 1989 DAS headquarters bombing and the November 1989 bombing of Avianca Flight 203, targeting judges, politicians, journalists and police in an effort to force the government to abandon extradition to the United States. The campaign killed hundreds of civilians and security personnel and provoked an intense manhunt (the Search Bloc, aided by US agencies and a rival paramilitary group, Los Pepes) that culminated in Escobar's death in a rooftop shootout in Medellin on 2 December 1993, after which the organization fragmented and collapsed.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history